Elizabeth B. Noyce, 65, Benefactor of Maine With Vast Settlement From Her Divorce

By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.

Published: September 20, 1996

Elizabeth Bottomley Noyce, a microchip millionaire's scorned first wife who showed as much imagination and verve in deploying her half of his Silicon Valley fortune as he had in making it, died on Tuesday at her seaside home in Bremen, Me. She was 65 and had been the state's premier philanthropist and most innovative investor for two decades.

Her lawyer, Owen Wells, noting that Mrs. Noyce had long suffered from emphysema, said the cause was a heart attack.

The daughter of a blue-collar worker from Auburn, Mass., who had to hold two jobs to support his family in the Depression, Mrs. Noyce was majoring in English at Tufts University in the early 1950's and dreaming of becoming a writer when she signed on as costume director of a summer theatrical production and caught the eye of one of the cast members, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Robert N. Noyce.

The couple were married in 1953, and Mrs. Noyce, who had dreamed of writing novels and short stories, became the most dutiful of corporate wives, bearing four children and following her husband from job to job, including a somewhat reluctant move to California for a woman who never felt comfortable away from her beloved New England.

''We were under the distinct impression that we would try it for a year and if I didn't like it we wouldn't stay,'' she recalled years later, suggesting that her husband had forgotten the bargain: ''We stayed 19 years.''

By then the life of the blue-collar worker's daughter had changed considerably, largely because her husband had become a co-inventor of the microchip, which laid the foundation for the vast personal computer industry, and had helped found three of the industry's premier companies, including the giant Intel Corporation.

Her life changed even more in 1975 when Mr. Noyce left her to marry an Intel executive. Although bitter over the circumstances of the breakup of her marriage, Mrs. Noyce, whose husband died in 1990, managed to console herself somewhat in the divorce. Under California's community property laws she claimed half his Intel stock and all his other assets, including full title to their 50-acre Maine estate, where Mrs. Noyce had been spending summers.

How much she received from the divorce could not be determined yesterday, and a spokesman for Intel, which has a market capitalization of $86 billion, could not say how much stock she owned at the time of her death. Mr. Wells, her lawyer, said, however, that after all her charitable donations, her estate was worth $100 million to $1 billion.

Putting her husband and California behind her, Mrs. Noyce did not so much move to Maine as adopt the state.

In a whirlwind of philanthropy that began almost as soon as she settled into her house on Muscongus Bay and continued the rest of her life, she systematically gave away some $75 million, primarily to Maine charities.

Oh, there would be the occasional out-of-state donation -- a million to Tufts here, a half-million to Harvard there -- but for the most part Mrs. Noyce, whose donations covered the gamut of public causes including education, medicine, the arts and the environment, concentrated her giving in Maine, responding to virtually any cause, charity or public institution in the state that needed money.

Among other things, she built a golf course for the town of Bremen, gave lavishly to the Portland Museum of Art, the Maine Maritime Museum and the University of Maine. When the Cumberland County Civic Center was so pressed for cash that it was looking for a corporate sponsor that would give it money in exchange for the right to give the center its name, Mrs. Noyce came through with a $1.3 million donation that allowed the center to retain its identity.

But for all the acclaim Mrs. Noyce received for her direct philanthropy, including the $15 million in endowments for charitable trusts that make independent grants to Maine charities, Mrs. Noyce gained even more applause when she began pioneering what she called ''catalytic philanthropy,'' investments designed to bolster the state's economy.

In 1991, for example, when out-of-state financial institutions were picking off Maine's banks one by one and it appeared that Maine businesses and other borrowers would soon be at the mercy of distant lenders, Mrs. Noyce blithely created a brand new bank, the Maine Bank and Trust Company with an initial $7.7 million investment that eventually grew to some $14 million.

What made such ''philanthropy,'' especially appealing became apparent when the bank prospered. Mr. Wells, who advised Mrs. Noyce on her investments, estimated yesterday that the bank was now worth at least twice what she paid for it.

During a lull in Maine's construction industry, Mrs. Noyce built five homes to provide jobs for construction workers, and when Maine's leading bakery was threatened with a takeover by a company that intended to move it out of state, Mrs. Noyce came to the rescue, buying the bakery and saving its 1,200 jobs.

Recently Mrs. Noyce had turned her attention to Portland's deteriorating downtown, going on a buying spree in which she acquired about 10 percent of the city's office and retail space. The rehabilitation effort attracted L. L. Bean and other tenants.

Although her efforts won wide praise, there were some rumblings that Mrs. Noyce was becoming too big a factor in the Portland economy and she had recently announced that she had no further designs on downtown property.

For all her wealth, Mrs. Noyce lived fairly simply, shunning the usual trappings of wealth and even driving her own car, most recently a Cadillac, to be sure, but only, she told her friends, because after a wreck in her smaller Oldsmobile, she felt more secure in a larger car.

Although she was always appropriately dressed, Mrs. Noyce had no interest in fashion and even less in travel, preferring to stay in Maine rather than visit the world's resorts.

Not that she was above the occasional indulgence. When she found that the steep driveway to her house became dangerously slick with wintertime ice, she built a more accessible winter home a thousand feet away.

Her only real material weakness stemmed from her love of the water, but it was a tribute to her reputation for innovative ''catalytic philanthropy,'' that when she indulged her passion by commissioning a multimillion-dollar 60-foot yacht a few years ago, the acquisition was not viewed in Maine as an example of conspicuous consumption. Instead the purchase was trumpeted in the Maine press as a rescue of Maine's boat-building industry.

In recent months Mrs. Noyce had apparently developed renewed concern about the state's beleaguered boat builders. She had commissioned a 90-foot yacht.

Mrs. Noyce is survived by a son, William, of Hollis, N.H.; three daughters, Pendred of Weston, Mass.; Priscilla, of Kenya and Margaret, of Montana; two brothers, Frank Bottomley of Ohio and Bruce, of New Hampshire; a sister, Frances Broomhead of Rhode Island, and 13 grandchildren.